Soon

Artist

Curator

Exhibition Dates

Apr 1 – Sep 1, 2018

Richmond-based artist Marisa K. Holmes is interested in the culturally inherited power structures within images and their resulting modes of representation. Her artistic practice attempts to highlight the signs and symbols embedded within media. Working with found images as her referents, Holmes’s practice implicates a public’s subjective reception of signifiers within images. Her work also hopes to initiate a discourse concerning mass media exposure within her generation. Considering herself primarily an image assembler, Holmes hopes to highlight the translation “losses” and accomplishments that occur when an image is presented within the public sphere, keeping in mind all contextual circumstances including the historical time of its viewing and the concurrent cultural spheres within the location of its “unveiling.”

Soon seeks conflict with the commercial advertising surrounding it. Both in reference to and disrupting the global clothing brand adverts wallpapered across the glass facades of the station, Holmes’s work initially blends into this environment but quickly confounds its viewer. The work reverberates the cacophonous visual experience of the Canada Line station. The commuter hub is a friction between the daily corporeal experience of getting from A to B and the brash attack of lifestyle propaganda and marketing. Holmes uses found elements, corporate colour palettes, snap photographs, and industrial textures in the production of a photo-based assemblage that presents a raw and bewildering response to the current sociopolitical conditions. The repetitive text “soon – soon – soon” becomes a spiralling chant that reads as both a superficial promise of the new and a reply to the continual feedback loop of our world headed in the wrong direction.

Presented in partnership withCanada Line Public Art Program—InTransit BC

Richmond–Brighouse Station is curated byRichmond Art Gallery in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program